Hey,
I built philsternarchives.com and had to solve the same question. I never found a good way to do it. I ended up using NextGen because it allowed bluk FTP importing of photos, but there is still a lot of clicking that you need to do.

wow, lotsa photos.
depending on how you wish to presnt them.. when I have a large grouping, I like to do an external gallery.

I found MS really good. it’s external to wordpress, but very slick.
has two great features.

1. just drop a folder full of images into it’s folder, and it automatically creates the thumbnails. Includes slideshow.
I use it for a 200 image virtual tour. here.http://greenspotantiques.com/wp/green-spot-is/virtual-tour
(the virtual tour is totally replaced each month, only takes a minute to delete thumbnails, and replace large images in the folder)

and
2. I drop it into a wordpress page as an iframe. and it’s good to go. hasn’t let me down yet. The beauty is in the managing.
It’s a simple file thing.. you just add files to the folders and it’s all automatic from there.